''I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed,'' he said in an interview in 1981. He wrote a book about his political experiences, ''The Naked God'' (1957).

He left the party in 1956, disillusioned by the Soviet Union's own stunning revelations of Stalin's terror and the spread of anti-Semitism there. Fast joined the party in 1943, a decision he often said was made at least in part because of the poverty he experienced as a child growing up in Upper Manhattan. He served three months in a federal prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress, a charge arising from his refusal to produce the records of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. His output was slowed but not entirely interrupted by the blacklisting he endured in the 1950's after it became known that he had been a member of the Communist Party and then refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. At his less successful, in novels like ''Clarkton'' (1947), about a textile-mill strike, and ''Silas Timberman'' (1954), about an academic victim of McCarthyism, he was sometimes faulted as being drawn toward propagandistic sentimentality. Fast's well-paced narratives achieved, his work tended to succeed or fail as art to the extent that he distanced himself from ideology.Īt his best, in a novel like ''The Last Frontier'' (1941), about the flight in 1878 of the Cheyenne Indians to their Powder River home in Wyoming, he achieved powerful effects through imaginative objectivity. ''Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life,'' he said in a 1972 interview.ĭespite the international popularity of historical novels like ''Paine,'' which glorified the professional revolutionary, and the huge commercial success that Mr.

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